Child of the Heroic Spirits

At some point, the Demon Lords had come to stand in front of Merea, with their backs to him.

As if to shield the one they had been leaning on the whole way here.

Merea looked at them, and a small smile rose on his face.

It was a happy smile.

It stayed there a moment, and then went.

What replaced it was the face of a fighter with his resolve fully set.

"Then I'll stand in front of them again. I'll plant myself in front of comrades who have decided to fight, one more time. — That's the pride I carry. That's the hero's posture I swore my family I would hold."

Merea's shadow fell darkly across the world.

There was no hollow feel to him anymore, no fragility.

The expression on his face had a clear outline now.

"Hasim."

He went on.

"We'll do what we can do, on our end. So — lend us your hand."

"I came here for that."

"Will you swear it on Leilas Lif Lemuse's name."

"…You knew about her?"

The name, surfacing without warning, made Hasim's eyes widen, briefly.

"She was one of my family. She was already gone by the time I had any sense of myself, but —"

"…A heroic spirit, then."

She was there. Hasim was, even to himself, oddly certain of it.

It was probably because Merea had the same white hair as Leilas.

"Are you Leilas's descendant?"

"No. Princess Leilas had no children."

"Right — they did say that, now I think of it."

"I'm from the line of Princess Leilas's sister. The hair, the eye colour — both came down from the sister. — Mind, the rest of the royal family carry entirely different colouring. So with me, it's a coincidence."

Hasim brushed his own hair with a hand, briefly remembered his other siblings, and as quickly cleared the picture out.

"Even so — I intend to inherit the pride of Lemuse's hero, the 〈White Emperor〉, Leilas. And on that ground, I swear. — On that white hair."

"Yes."

Inside, Hasim was thinking.

The thought was as unrestrained as a child's wish, and grounded in nothing — but he chose to believe it.

This Merea standing in front of him was, probably, the last factor Leilas had left in the world. Hope.

"…Strange things do happen, don't they. I had this filed under fairy tale up until now. That's how strange a story it was. I'd love to ask you the rest in detail — but —"

"— we don't have that kind of time, do we."

"No."

Through the gaps in the wall his men had formed, he looked across the wilderness.

The Mūzeg wave was, slowly, beginning to move.

"— Are you ready?"

At his words, Merea and the Demon Lords with him nodded.

"I'll give the orders. If anyone else is used to the field, I'll take input. Either way — we hold. Reinforcements from the Three Kingdoms will reach us in time. Until then, we endure together."

Whatever cost it took, they would hold.

Hasim carried that resolve in his chest, but didn't put it into the air.

His subordinates, however, understood it.

To keep the Demon Lords alive, they were going to have to put their bodies on the line.

This was history's pivot.

They would be the foundation it stood on.

What had looked, until recently, like a slow rot under a fool king, had been struck through by a great blaze that called itself Hope.

A blaze that would burn life as fuel.

But — Lemuse.

Did not flinch in front of it.

And to make it burn brighter still —

— burned its own life.

---

The tension rose.

The other side was, gradually, redressing its formation. No decisive movement yet, but the command-and-operations work was clearly progressing.

Tracking that, their side did the same — Hasim at the centre, the formation took shape around him.

In particular, Hasim was concentrating on hearing each Demon Lord out on their abilities.

In the middle of that —

"Hasim."

"What."

Merea brought it up.

"You seem to know Serius Brad Mūzeg. Quite well."

The moment Hasim had arrived, he had read at a glance that Serius wasn't on the other side.

That line was still in Merea's head.

"There's history between him and me."

"Then there's something I want to ask."

Merea's face was set straight.

"Go on."

"To explain it — I should say, first: I have a weakness."

That was how he opened.

"You? A weakness? — You, who fires off multiple Heroic Spirit major formulae?"

In the course of building the line, Hasim had gotten a rough overview of Merea's abilities.

Among that — that Merea could wield the signature major formulae of the Heroic Spirits, the ones that show up in legend — had been put on the table.

He'd had the strange sense of recognition over Merea earlier, so the fact itself didn't shake him too hard. That Merea could fire them simultaneously, on the other hand, had visibly thrown him.

"I'm still struggling to believe you can run 〈Lightning God〉 and 〈Wind God〉 at the same time."

"That's the weakness."

Merea shook his head.

"I don't have an interim."

---

"Interim?"

Hasim cocked his head, briefly.

He didn't, yet, follow what Merea meant.

"Why do you suppose 〈Lightning God〉 and 〈Wind God〉 got those titles. It's because in their respective domains they were broad specialists. Formulae are, by nature, more flexible than the headline. It isn't only the signed major formulae that are the heart of the work."

"Right. As a rule, the natural-phenomenon Title-holders handled their domain's formulae — all of them — with great dexterity."

"But I — only inherited part of their craft."

That was when Hasim caught the edge of the picture.

It made sense, when one stopped to think. The grand-scale formulae the Heroic Spirits had spent their lifetimes developing weren't the kind of thing a person could pick up by the half-dozen.

That thought tripped something in his head.

"Wait — how old are you."

Belated, that question. He asked it on impulse.

"My birth was unusual, so the answer's a little vague — but I haven't been in this world twenty years, I think."

"Twen—"

His voice caught, almost in spite of himself.

"You've put together this many formulae in twenty years…?!"

It was anomalous.

It was not normal.

Looking at the strangeness of Merea's origin, he had even half-suspected the man might look young while being long-lived in another sense — but apparently age matched appearance.

That, itself, struck Hasim a little dumb.

"From my side, this is what I only managed to inherit. The full sum of what they built, in formula-system terms, lives compressed inside these signed major formulae. So those are what I was made to learn, before anything else."

"That's the order backwards. Normally one starts at base theory and works up —"

"There was no time. They themselves were caught between unfinished business and moving on."

Hasim recalled what was said about the spirits that lived on the holy mountain of Lindholm.

"And — to be honest — I'm not particularly bright."

"If anyone could acquire all the Heroic Spirits' formulae you just described in twenty years, that person isn't human. — That's a god, or close to."

Hasim said it with a straight face.

Merea only shrugged.

"From my end — even though I can fire the signed major formulae on demand, I still can't really wield the fine-grained, attribute-attached side of those formulae with any flexibility. That's the missing interim. The cost is bad efficiency, and attacks that have to lean on raw output. They're inclined to come out straight-line."

To Hasim, the news that Merea had a fine-grained weakness like that was less the surprise than —

*— And he's still developing?

— that was what struck him more.

"If I had the formula-sense Flander Crow had, I'd probably have picked all that up by now. But I don't have what the 〈Technique God〉 had."

"The 〈Technique God〉's title has gone unawarded since Flander Crow's death. Still vacant. — Meaning, Flander Crow was too anomalous. The kind of man who appears once in several centuries, if at all. A pure outlier of a genius. You're picking the wrong man to compare yourself to."

At that, Merea smiled — a little pleased.

"Right. Flander was something else. He taught me a great deal about formulae, and I never caught up to his composition or his creative instinct. — Only —"

Even so, in one specific corner, Merea outdid even Flander.

"This is something Flander told me, in fact. Apparently I'm unusually good at processing many things at once."

"That, as well, is a formula talent in itself."

"That's part of why. And — none of us knew how long the Heroic Spirits could remain in this world. So after the basic theory got hammered into me, they jumped straight to teaching me the finished product. The signed major formulae. As I said earlier, those formulae have the entire system the spirit built compressed into them. If you know the finished answer, in time you can work backward and deduce the interim."

"That's deranged. The order is reversed beyond reason. A formula is a formula. Without going through the derivation theory term by term — can you actually memorise something so absurdly intricate that you couldn't draw it across the wall of a great palace?"

Hasim could not, for the life of him, accept this.

He had once seen a certain Demon Lord's signed major formula himself; the complexity had given him vertigo enough that he had given up on learning it on the spot. He hadn't even properly parsed it.

"I memorised it."

"…How."

"Asking how is hard to answer in a sentence — but to be very simple about it: by stupid amounts of training. With teachers who were like demons attached to me at all hours."

"Training does that?"

"How many years do you think I spent on that mountain, every single day, doing nothing but that. It wasn't for show that I was sealed off from the outside world."

Merea shrugged, and gave the answer — almost anticlimactically simple.

---

As Hasim had said: short of someone with a genius-grade formula-sense like Flander's, acquiring an entire set of formula systems built independently by Heroic Spirits in under twenty years was effectively impossible.

Formulae that men far above ordinary had spent years developing, stacked one on top of another — not one but several of them — acquired in full.

If a person could really do that, they would be next door to a god.

Both sides sensed that the Heroic Spirits could not stay in this world indefinitely.

Merea's existence was, to them, a light bright enough to cancel out their unfinished business.

There were also, simply, a lot of them.

The amount of time each one had with Merea was limited.

The method they arrived at, in those constraints, was —

— first cram the finished formula — the one with all their theory baked in — into him; let him work the theory back out under his own power afterwards.

To have him commit to memory those can't-fit-on-the-palace-wall monstrosities, as Hasim put it, without even understanding the underlying theory, was on its face absurd.

But they had decided that it was the only way, and had carried it through.

By their absurd policy, Merea —

---

— underwent training that bordered on insanity.

---

The completed renderings of each signed formula they showed him had, at the time, looked to Merea like nothing more than absurdly intricate patterns.

Told to memorise that whole, anyone would have wanted to leap off the mountain.

If he could have read meaning into each fine detail, fine — but to him, looking, it was the same as looking at the leaves on a passing tree.

Asked to recall, later, the number of leaves he'd seen — no one could. Merea's head retained nothing.

Even so, he didn't quit.

The Heroic Spirits had treated those formulae as something they valued as much as their own bodies; sometimes they even spoke of them with pride. He wanted, somehow, to leave that behind in this world for them.

So Merea, every day, at a fixed hour, burned each spirit's formula into his vision.

He would look, copy. Look, copy. Again, and again. Repetitions until he was nearly out of his mind.

Memorise is too soft a word for the act. The patterns showed up in his dreams; they showed up while his eyes were open.

And in the end —

— Merea seared it into his brain.

It was, in the literal sense, like memorising the entire layout of a palace-sized maze sprawled across a single great wall — every dead end, every wall stain, every detail — without missing one.

The result was a lopsided form of mastery: from a complete standstill, no run-up, he could go from zero to two hundred kilometres an hour in a single instant.

A child still on all fours had, without learning to walk on two feet or run, suddenly learned to fly.

In hindsight, when the Heroic Spirits had said good bones, the phrase was praise for the extreme aptitude, yes — but more importantly, perhaps, praise for the simple humanity of someone who had pushed an insane regimen all the way to the end.

Afterwards, gifted with an unusually deep magic-element reservoir for firing those major formulae, and a processing capacity that even outstripped Flander's, Merea reached the point of being able to fire signed major formulae simultaneously.

Merea was the inverse of an ordinary practitioner.

He had inherited the finished render before he understood the mechanism.

A formula — a thing where, if you understood the mechanism, the next step would naturally follow — he had memorised as picture.

The reverse of that was the absence-of-the-interim — the lack of flexibility — that came of not understanding the underlying theory.

---

"— Wait. You said you can use the 〈Technique God〉's Reverse Formula. That's a thing only Flander Crow's natural formula-sense could possibly handle, surely."

"Right — my Reverse Formula and Flander's Reverse Formula are similar, but they're different things."

Merea, again, shook his head.

"Mine is a reflexive Reverse Formula. Flander's was a thinking-through Reverse Formula. Meaning — when I'm composing the reverse, I'm not really thinking much."

"That's nonsense. You're not thinking? — what does not thinking mean, here."

"Reflex, like I said. The thinking step gets bypassed entirely. That's how Flander and the others trained me into it."

This man's not right in the head. Hasim caught himself thinking it.

"Even you have moments, don't you, where you can't reproduce something but you have a sense of I've seen this somewhere before. — Mine's better than that. I don't have to retain all the fine detail; from a certain point in, general feel gets me there. And above all — with these eyes, I'm actually seeing the finished render in real time."

He pointed at his red eyes.

〈Magic Eyes of the Technique God〉

The eyes that unravel any formula.

The moment Merea's eyes locked onto an opponent's formula, he bypassed the thinking step entirely and — by something close to a spinal reflex — assembled the matching reverse formula on the spot.

Half-automatic, experience-driven generation.

It was Flander who had trained him into it; in truth, the sense itself wasn't fully comprehensible even to Flander.

The formula-side spirits, Flander chief among them, had — in the time they had left before their bodies ascended to the Empyrean — thrown every formula they could at him, and then some.

The number of formulae Merea had laid eyes on with those eyes was, probably, more than the contents of multiple national formula-libraries combined.

On top of that, Flander had shown him the reverse formulae for all of them.

Of course, Merea did not consciously remember all of them.

But through that abnormal, hyper-specialised exposure, an odd sense had taken shape in him.

Somehow, this kind of formula pairs with this kind of reverse.

And further —

Probably, this pattern matches this pattern.

In the end —

— it stopped being expressible in words.

"But — that means you have to wait until the opponent's formula is complete, doesn't it. Reading ahead and fielding a pre-emptive offensive reverse formula like Flander did —"

"Right, Flander could complete his reverse off fifty percent of the opponent's formula. On a good day he'd add original improvements on top. I can't do that. — But: at eighty, ninety percent finished, my reflex fires."

"And that's in time?"

The opponent has finished ninety percent of his formula, and only then you start —

"In time."

Merea answered casually.

Merea's formula ability was — in pure construction speed — also —

— well outside the norm.

"As long as the opponent isn't Flander, I catch him."

"As long as he isn't the 〈Technique God〉, you catch him? — In a world where the 〈Technique God〉 is gone, that means you are the fastest?"

"No — same starting line, I think I'm faster than Flander. Flander told me to be proud of that, so I'm dropping the false modesty for once."

"Faster than the 〈Technique God〉. — How many times now. This man is not right."

Even as a battlefield bore down in front of them, Hasim, in the end, threw both hands up. — He couldn't not throw them up.

"In exchange — keeping the processing budget for the reverse formula in reserve — the maximum number of Heroic Spirit formulae I can fire in parallel is, currently, two. — That's my weakness."

"How many people in this world do you think could even exploit a weakness like that. If I have time, I'll count them for you. Probably won't take long."

"But Serius Brad Mūzeg —"

Now, finally, Hasim caught what Merea was getting at.

He answered the moment he saw it.

He had an answer.

"…Yes. — He'll spot it. And, very likely, he'll attack it."

"So that's how it is."

"At the very least, that he'll spot it — that I'm sure of."

He let that stand, then went on.

"For what it's worth, my private reading: in pure raw output — physical and formula-side both — Merea is the higher one. Serius is, granted, a step or two ahead of an ordinary man on those fronts as well, but he isn't on your level. Even so — he's good. Inhumanly good at the act of fighting itself. So even with simple performance against him, I have an odd certainty: he will find your weakness, and pry at it."

Eyes lowered, Merea gave a small nod.

The reaction said he had, in his own way, expected that answer.

"If it were possible, I wanted you taking Serius's head yourself. Knowing all that, though — that's too dangerous."

Hasim made the call from Merea's posture.

He couldn't pretend his own image of Serius was free of overestimation. Even so, without a real chance of victory, he couldn't send Merea in that direction.

"Aside from all that — this is all on the assumption Serius is coming at all. Will he really come? We caught what looked like him at Lindholm, but I can't quite see why that means he'd run all the way down to here."

The voice was Elma's.

She had stepped in between the two of them from the side, planted her demon-blade in the dirt, and tilted her head.

"He'll come. Their handling of land dragons is what bothers me."

Hasim cast his eyes once more at the dragon's carcass.

"There weren't land dragons at the mountain, were there? Though that may be because, at that point, what Mūzeg was chasing was just me."

"Right. Run that backwards: their supply of dragons can't yet be enough to dispatch for a single pursuer. Those three were almost certainly precious."

Hasim pulled his eyes off the dragon and turned to Elma.

"But Serius now knows there's a cluster of Demon Lords on that mountain. For pursuit at that scale, it's entirely plausible he'd recall land dragons from his home country and bring them to bear. And —"

He said the next bit almost lightly, half a joke.

"He has a nose for it. He's pulled toward the smell of war as if he were a favourite of the god — no, the demon — of war. There's no logic for it. But there it is."

Elma, in fact, felt that baseless logic land in her with strange force.

She had lived the same kind of life on battlefields — and knew the kind of person Hasim was describing.

"…There are some. Without meaning to, they end up walking battlefield to battlefield. — I see. In that case — yes, he may come. Which puts Merea against him in the dangerous bracket again."

"No."

The voice that pushed back, surprisingly, was Merea's.

His eyes, lowered until now, had at some point come back up. They were on Hasim.

"That, in fact, may be the very thing that gives me a chance at an opening on Serius."

---

"I have a way to limitedly overturn my weakness."

---

Because Merea had looked his own weakness in the face — that ugly thing — he had also worked out a counter to it.

A hidden blade tucked, quietly, inside the weakness itself.

A trump card buried in the dark — invisible to anyone who had not gotten this far.

In Merea's eyes, an intense will-to-fight had flashed alight.